Richard

Richard is one of the Tribe’s young men selected to venture beyond its familiar territory, and his journey with Robert brings home a first-hand account of other survivors and the transformed landscape. His place in the expedition marks him as capable of traveling independently, while the details he reports make distant communities and regions newly present to the Tribe.

Selection and Departure

When the Tribe considers who should go, the prospect attracts nearly everyone. The decision is not simply a matter of enthusiasm: Ish is ruled out because the injury left by the mountain-lion attack still limits him, George is considered too old, and Ezra is judged a poor shot and poorly suited to looking after himself in the open. The younger men are also generally kept from leaving their wives and young families. Robert and Richard are chosen instead, as young men considered able to manage the journey. Their mothers, Em and Molly, are doubtful, but the meeting’s enthusiasm carries the decision; both young men are delighted.

The preparations show the practical scale of leaving. When Ish goes to find Robert and Richard, he finds them in front of his house with three dog-teams ready and a rifle barrel protruding from one wagon. The image conveys a community sending out a small, equipped party rather than a casual visitor: the expedition is expected to travel through country where the travelers must be prepared to fend for themselves. At this stage, the visible preparations are dog-teams and a rifle; the later account of the journey describes the jeep negotiating the roads, without the available account explaining the relationship between these arrangements.

The Journey and Its Report

After their return, the young men tell their story to the Tribe. They have traveled south to Los Angeles, encountering only minor washouts and landslides on the highway, obstacles the jeep could manage in four-wheel drive. There, they meet a group dressed in long white garments, with long sleeves, who throw stones, call the travelers unclean, and insist that they are the People of God. The group makes the boys keep their distance. Richard’s journey thus reveals not an empty landscape but a survivor community organized around a forceful religious identity.

The account also places the boys’ route in relation to Ish’s earlier travels. Leaving Los Angeles, they take U.S. Route 66 east across the desert, where the road is largely open apart from occasional sand blown across it and scattered tire blowouts. The bridge over the Colorado River is shaky but passable. Their journey then turns onto Highway 6, whose surviving markers Robert recognizes by their resemblance to the numerals on Route 66. The route carries them through the corner of Colorado and across the plains of Nebraska, linking recognizable fragments of the old road system to a country altered by neglect.

Richard contributes a vivid measure of that change: cattle are everywhere, repeatedly visible across the plains. When Ish asks whether the boys have seen the large brown animals with humps on their shoulders, Richard says they have seen a few. His answer gives the report a particular, concrete detail: alongside the familiar cattle are occasional animals Ish can identify by description, an indication of the varied herds now roaming the open country.

Significance

Richard’s importance in these scenes lies in what his return makes knowable. Before the expedition, the Tribe can only speculate about contact beyond its own region; afterward, its members hear of an organized religious group in Los Angeles, passable routes across the desert and river, and abundant cattle on the plains. The expedition converts distant possibilities into testimony shared around the community’s fire.

The account also draws a generational contrast. Ish remembers traveling east on Route 66 in the days after the Great Disaster, when he was not much older than the boys now are. The same road therefore joins two journeys across different moments: Ish’s early passage through the aftermath and Richard and Robert’s later exploration of a world in which a new generation has grown up. Richard is both a traveler in his own right and a link in that transfer of experience, bringing observations back to a community whose knowledge of the wider world depends on those willing and able to go.